For Many Teens, Summer Jobs May Be Thing Of The Past

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/05/31/154069672/for-many-teens-summer-jobs-may-be-thing-of-the-past

The school year's winding down, meaning teenagers around the country will soon be trying to pull in some extra cash scooping ice cream or manning those kiosks at the mall.

But with the job market still weak, teens are facing stiff competition landing summer jobs. And while the downturn has hit young job seekers particularly hard, it's not just the lingering effects of the Great Recession working against them: the drop-off in teen summer hiring actually began long before 2007.

The past two summers were the worst for teen employment in the U.S. since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began measuring just after the end of World War II, according to a new report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.

Just under 30 percent of U.S. teens had jobs in the summers of 2010 and 2011, down sharply from 42.6 percent in 2006 before the recession began — and a far cry from the heady summers of the late 1940s, when over half of the nation's teens were employed.